Jalup i+1 method to get fluency?

4 comments

1. i+1 is an effective learning strategy that Jalup have, I guess, incorporated into their system. It is backed up by tons of academic research. With that said, you can 100% do it on your own and for free. Even if the information is good, the website is full of exaggerations and sales tactics, so that’s a big no for me. 10/mins a day ain’t gonna cut it unless you are plugging in like Neo.

2. i+1 as a general concept almost everyone believes, basically you find something a little bit too hard for you and struggle through it and that increases you skill

   i+1 for sentence cards *specifically* IDK, a lot of people use sentence cards but I *think* more people use vocab cards than sentence cards with one unknown in it, though these cards may have example sentences in the notes section

   but I’m not super sure, would like to hear from other people

   I mostly use vocab cards, I tried sentence ones for a while but they weren’t as fast to flip through and it was too easy to just fall into a trap where you recognize that word only in that sentence.

3. I did Jalup (first 5k cards). Compared to other prebuilt decks, the JALUP dekcs are the most high-quality i+1 sentence deck I’ve found. They also include native audio for every sentence. Of course, the cost ($300 for everything last time I checked) is usually what stops most people from using it (and stopped me for a time until I caved after thinking about it for a year or so).

   Would I recommend it? As of a few years ago I’d have said yes. However, the owner has recently decided to stop supporting JALUP, meaning that the app no longer works on the latest iOS. So I’d honestly find something else if you are looking for a prepackaged deck. Of course, you could always buy the Anki JALUP decks, but they don’t have the cross-linking feature that made the JALUP app so great, and imo aren’t worth $300.

4. I+1 is a waste of time for nouns and anything that does not change via modifiers. These are ideally straight vocab cards for the first 1k – or simple sentences using the target.

   Many sentences which i+1 would be useful are in the N3+ range, but you already will naturally be at i+1 by that point.

   When it comes right down to it, I+1 assumes you are going to be reading or listening to the sentence every time. If you are doing SRS, it is to understand the target – while it is great to know 100% of the sentence it certainly is not necessary and with the way most people struggle through the beginning stages – it will set total comprehension as an expectation when you get to actual reading. Such a thing does not happen even at N1 level – and you are not doing 7000 vocab I+1 in a vacuum I’d assume, but whether or not you get all that vocab before you start your first native material – regular material would be fairly easy anyways at that point. I think 8k vocab is where One Piece became fun for me, 10k was no dictionary and 15k for most LNs, 20k+ I still encounter unknowns but it is mostly slang, specialized or classical Japanese.